Thursday, August 14, 2014

Details of the $7.5 billion water
package approved by the Legislature Wednesday for the November ballot (the
total repayment cost is projected to be $14.7 billion over 30 years, assuming a
5 percent interest rate on the borrowing):

$2.7 billion for water storage
projects, with criteria that are designed to encourage building the Sites
Reservoir in Colusa County north of Sacramento and Temperance Flat dam
northeast of Fresno.

California Governor Jerry Brown
approved on Wednesday a $7.6 billion plan to improve water supplies in the
drought-stricken state that will be put before voters in November, ending a
year of political wrangling over the measure.

California is in the throes of a
devastating multi-year drought that is expected to cost its economy $2.2
billion in lost crops, jobs and other damages.

Part of California's $7.5 billion
water plan approved by legislators on Wednesday will go into building a
reservoir in Colusa County discussed since the 1950s.

Some neighbors are embracing the
plan to submerge 14,000 acres of rolling hills 20 miles west of Colusa for the
proposed Sites Reservoir. "Revenue, money, water, resources. Bring land
value up. There is a lot of good reasons for it," said Donald Carter.

Driven to action by the state's
historic drought, California lawmakers on Wednesday voted to place a $7.5
billion water plan before voters in November. The measure marks the largest
investment in decades in the state's water infrastructure and is designed to
build reservoirs, clean up contaminated groundwater and promote water-saving
technologies.

It replaces an existing water
bond that was approved by a previous Legislature but was widely considered too
costly and too bloated with pork-barrel projects to win favor with voters.

California lawmakers on Wednesday
voted to place a $7.5 billion water plan before voters in November, driven to
action by the state's severe and costly drought.

The measure would mark the
largest investment in decades in California's water infrastructure and is
designed to build reservoirs, clean up contaminated groundwater and promote
water-saving technologies.

Voters in California will pass
judgement on a massive $7.2 billion water bond package aimed at addressing a
record drought after interest groups came to a last-minute agreement this week.

Gov. Jerry Brown (D) on Tuesday
unveiled a compromise plan that earned support from interest groups ranging
from conservationists to the Chamber of Commerce and agricultural businesses.
Late Wednesday, legislators passed the plan by the required two-thirds vote
after scrambling to meet a legal deadline for this year's election.

After months of political
haggling, a ballot measure that will ask voters in November to approve $7.5
billion in borrowing for water projects sailed through the Legislature on
Wednesday.

Soon afterward, flanked by dozens
of lawmakers from both parties, Gov. Jerry Brown signed the measure, which is
intended to provide funds for new reservoirs, water cleanup and environmental
protection.

California lawmakers voted
Wednesday night to swap out an unpopular $11 billion water bond with one they
hope voters will find more palatable: a scaled-back $7 billion version that
earned widespread bipartisan support. It was promptly signed by Gov. Jerry
Brown.

The smaller water bond will
appear on the November statewide ballot as Proposition 1. Included in the deal
is $2.7 billion for water storage projects, $900 million for groundwater
cleanup and monitoring, $725 million for water recycling and $1.5 billion for watershed
restoration programs.

Anyone who has followed water
politics in California knows it is messy, divisive and often defies compromise.
In view of those dynamics, Wednesday's near-unanimous floor votes to approve a
new November water bond -- 37-0 in the Senate and 77-2 in the Assembly -- mark
an impressive bit of political deal making.

Gov. Jerry Brown has made it
clear he is no fan of additional deep borrowing by the state. But given the
severe drought gripping California, he also recognized the need to push a
comprehensive water bond that would provide relief through short-term fixes
like recycling and treatment as well as longer-term remedies that take the form
of more reservoir storage.

"You know why there are so
many whitefish in the Yellowstone River?" asked Montana-based landscape
artist Russell Chatham, in his 1978 book. "Because the Fish and Game
people have never done anything to help them." I keep that quotation in
mind whenever the government promises to solve a problem, especially a big one
that promises to tame nature.

The very act of legislative
sausage making - that age-old cliché about the ugly nature of lawmaking -
assures that deals to please special interests and appease people with
differing political philosophies and constituencies drives the final result.
Ongoing efforts to craft a drought-related water bond fits that pattern to a
tee.

Five years after producing a
pork-bloated water bond proposal that failed the smell test, the Legislature
has offered up a new serving that's lean and digestible.

Credit mainly Gov. Jerry Brown,
who had the right recipe: smaller portions, light on delta ingredients. The
Legislature passed the bond bill Wednesday night. It doesn't quite fill
everyone's appetite but will do just fine.

The state of California uses more
groundwater than any other state in the union, but it's also the only state in
the West that doesn't have any regulations to make sure wells don't run dry.

Agriculture in Kern County is
doing the best it can to produce crops during another year of drought. At
this point, farmers have given up on El Niño bringing through any rain, forcing
them to rely even more on groundwater. "We're panicked," says Beatris
Sanders of the Kern County Farm Bureau. "It's incredibly
vital. We can't live without it. We can't farm without it. We
can't produce food."

Officials with the Merced
Irrigation District are urging growers to use all their water allocations by
Sept. 15.

The irrigation season will end
when Lake McClure's level drops to 85,000 acre-feet of water. Irrigation water
is measured per acre-foot, which is the amount of water it takes to cover an
acre of land a foot deep, or about 325,900 gallons.

For the next 10 days, water will
flow down the Tule River through Porterville and while the amount is not a lot,
it will benefit not only growers in the Terra Bella area, but residents along
the river and eventually the Porter Slough.

The 15-day water run began Aug. 7
and Sean Geivet, manager of the Porterville Irrigation District (PID), said at
the end of the release out of Success Dam the water will be diverted down the
Porter Slough to hopefully help residents along the slough whose wells have
gone dry.

Growers have expenses that
include fuel, fertilizer, and feed, but the biggest cost is labor with one out
of every four dollars spent on human workers. In the Midwest, predominant crops
like corn can be mechanically harvested.

Stockton Grower Marc Marchini
says his asparagus must be picked by hand. "A lot of people are trying to
get away from labor, you know, trying to go to mechanical harvesting,
mechanical pruning, mechanical everything," Marchini says.

Wednesday, August 13, 2014

In November, California voters
will be asked how much money they want to borrow to improve the state's water
infrastructure and fight the drought. Because polls show an $11.1 billion general
obligation bond on the Nov. 4 ballot is too expensive for many voters,
legislators are scrambling to revise the water bond to make it more palatable.

Along with the total amount,
another point of contention is how much is allotted to building new and
enlarging existing surface storage dams. The current bond and the $8.7 billion
version proposed by Senate Republicans include $3 billion for new and bigger
dams, but Gov. Jerry Brown's $6 billion proposal whittles this down to $2
billion. A coalition of environmental groups allocates $1 billion for surface
storage in its $6 billion plan.

Coalition response... Contrary to Evans' repetition of antiquated view of water storage dams,
for more than fifty years environmental interests have benefited from the many
advantages that our past investments in surface storage provide to our managed
waterways. Reservoirs have enabled us to meet the needs of fisheries, wetlands,
and meet other environmental water issues while seeking to meet the needs of
our cities, businesses and farms. We only have to look at where water in our
rivers is coming from in the middle of this year's hot summer. It's not natural
flow. The water we see supporting wildlife resources in our rivers and the
Delta is coming from previously built upstream storage - storage that was built
specifically for the purpose of providing water during a time of the year when
nature can't. Thankfully the legislature isn't falling for obstructionist
rhetoric this time and is taking seriously the need to build new storage
projects for California's growing economy. Wise investments will pay off down
the road as previous ones are now.

California Democrats scrambled on
Tuesday to win Republican support for a plan to improve water supplies that has
been mired in regional and party politics for a year, even as the state suffers
from a three-year drought that shows no sign of ending.

A day after voting for a two-day
extension to put a proposal on November's ballot to pay for reservoirs and
other projects by selling bonds, Democratic lawmakers enlisted the support and
negotiating clout of Democratic Governor Jerry Brown, a fiscal moderate who
said previous plans were too expensive.

Pressed by a deadline and
California's severe drought, state lawmakers are scheduled to vote Wednesday on
a measure that would swap out an existing water bond on the November ballot and
authorize billions in borrowing to pay for new reservoirs, groundwater cleanup
and habitat restoration.

On Tuesday, lawmakers were
negotiating what they hoped would be a final agreement with Gov. Jerry Brown
for a plan that would boost the state's water supply while protecting the
environment. The governor and Democratic legislative leaders had agreed on a
$7.2 billion package to replace the existing, $11.1 billion bond, but
Republican lawmakers were pressing for more money for water storage.

Chances are that sometime
Wednesday the Legislature will place a new water bond issue on the Nov. 4
ballot. But it's not certain, because as of late Tuesday, not all Democratic
legislators had signed onto a $7.2 billion plan and it still lacked votes it
needs from Republicans even if all Democrats were aboard.

Powerful voices in California's
water wars pledged their support Tuesday for a $7 billion state water bond that
lawmakers must pass before Wednesday's midnight deadline if they hope to see it
on the November ballot.

The California Farm Bureau
Federation and Los Angeles County's Metropolitan Water District had hoped for
at least $3 billion in the bond for construction of dams, reservoirs and other
storage projects.

The state's water bond will turn
into a rotten pumpkin if no deal is reached by Thursday's already extended
deadline. But legislators from the Northern San Joaquin Valley might just be
wearing glass slippers, if you'll forgive the fairytale metaphor.

Our state desperately needs a
water bond, but with urban Democrats squabbling, our legislators have a chance
to protect our region's water security.

Like Goldilocks tasting the bowls
of purloined porridge, California voters have been looking for a water bond
that is not too dear, and not too cheap, but just right.

If our Legislature has waited
until not only the last minute - that was Monday - but created a new last
minute, which is Wednesday, to finalize the language and thus the proposed
scale of spending on a crucial water bond during this third year of statewide
drought, well, what else is new? Legislative leaders were able to push the
deadline for printing the argument for such a bond on millions of sample
ballots by 48 hours, and if it results in a bond measure with the number of
billions of dollars voters will approve and an appropriate scope of work that
will aid in drought relief, so be it.

Once-teeming Lake Mead marinas
are idle as a 14-year drought steadily drops water levels to historic lows.
Officials from nearby Las Vegas are pushing conservation, but are also drilling
a new pipeline to keep drawing water from the lake.

Hundreds of miles away, farmers
who receive water from the lake behind Hoover Dam are preparing for the worst.

Delta farmers have quietly sipped
from rivers and sloughs for generations, but they face increasing pressure this
drought year from outside interests who argue those water diversions are - or
may be - illegal.

State and federal officials late
last month asked regulators to use their emergency powers to demand information
from more than 1,000 of those farmers as to how much water they're using.

People who follow California's
water wars may wonder whether experts who disagree on the Bay Delta
Conservation Plan ever agree on anything at all. The answer is yes. We agree
it's time to protect 37 miles of the Central Sierra's Mokelumne River as a
state Wild and Scenic River.

Sen. Loni Hancock, D-Oakland,
introduced the legislation to protect the river, Senate Bill 1199, which is now
in the state Assembly. The legislation would bar new dams and diversions on 37
miles of the "Moke" between Salt Springs Dam and Pardee Reservoir and
protect the river's water quality. It has no relationship to the larger water
fights in the state but should be judged on its own merits.

Tuesday, August 12, 2014

As cities brace for rationing and
many California farmers yank out trees and fallow land for crops, growers and
dairy farmers on 240,000 acres along the San Joaquin River near Los Banos are
comparatively awash in water. The property owners and farmers who are
within the 80-mile-long territory that falls under the authority of the San
Joaquin River Exchange Contractors will get 75 percent of the water they
historically receive this year from the California State Water Project and the
federal Central Valley Project.

Coalition response... As a result of the Exchange Contractors agreeing to shift the source of
their pre-1914 appropriative and riparian rights and enter into contracts with
the federal government, San Joaquin River water became available to farmers on
the eastside of the San Joaquin Valley who otherwise would not have that water
to grow much of the food that we all look for in our grocery stores. Cities and
small rural communities have also benefited from the water developed by the
construction of Friant Dam, a cornerstone of the CVP, which would not have
happened if the Exchange Contractors had not agreed to enter into the agreements
with the federal government over 75 years ago. Conservation programs are
extremely important and are implemented by each of the EC members. This
year the implementation of inflexible federal and state environmental
regulations coupled with the drought has crippled the CVP and forced the
federal government to make deliveries to senior right holders on the San
Joaquin River. If anyone has benefited from this "good deal," as Tom
Stokely describes it, it is the small rural communities in the San Joaquin
Valley, refuges and consumers throughout our state and around the world.

In November, California voters
will be asked how much money they want to borrow to improve the state's water
infrastructure and fight the drought. Because polls show an $11.1 billion
general obligation bond on the Nov. 4 ballot is too expensive for many voters,
legislators are scrambling to revise the water bond to make it more palatable.

Along with the total amount,
another point of contention is how much is allotted to building new and
enlarging existing surface storage dams. The current bond and the $8.7 billion
version proposed by Senate Republicans include $3 billion for new and bigger
dams, but Gov. Jerry Brown's $6 billion proposal whittles this down to $2
billion. A coalition of environmental groups allocates $1 billion for surface
storage in its $6 billion plan.

Scrambling to place a new water
bond before voters, California's legislative leaders on Monday converged on a
$7.195 billion proposal and carved out more time to finish it by delaying a
looming electoral deadline.

Contours of the water bond
blueprint surfaced as the Legislature toiled under a rapidly closing window to
act. With November elections months away, California's secretary of state was
scheduled to begin printing voter guides on Monday evening.

An agreement on a revised water
bond for the November ballot seemed within reach on Monday, but only if no side
gets too grabby. That includes legislators from both parties and from all
regions, and it includes members of Congress.

As The Bee's Jeremy B. White
reported, California lawmakers converged on a proposed bond in the range of
$7.2 billion.

Gov. Jerry Brown and Democratic
legislative leaders said Monday they are closing in on a deal to overhaul a
water bond on the November ballot, but their replacement plan still needs
support from Republicans.

Both houses of the Legislature
voted Monday to extend the deadline for printing voter pamphlets, giving
lawmakers and the governor another two days to reach an agreement.

More than 80% of California is
now in a state of extreme drought, according to the latest assessment. The
environmental conditions that residents are experiencing today actually began
in 2011. Still, there seems to be no end in sight. Water costs are sky high, as
you would expect, but Californians are paying the price in more ways than one.

The state's Central Valley
agriculture industry, for example, stands to lose $1.7 billion this year as a
result of what some believe is the worst drought to affect the region in 500
years. Some 14,500 workers could lose their jobs in an area responsible for
half of the state's agriculture and five percent of the entire nation's.

Nevada's Lake Mead, the nation's
largest reservoir, has hit an all time-low since it was first filled in the
1930s, raising concerns that a water shortage could be declared for a region
home to 40 million people in seven fast-growing states.

The first half of 2014 was by far
the hottest in California in 120 years of record-keeping, and that heat is
exacerbating one of the most devastating droughts in state history.

Month after month, the red and
burgundy patches on the California drought map have been spreading, with 82
percent of the state now classified as being in "extreme" or
"exceptional" drought on the U.S. Drought Monitor website.

TID recognizes there are
challenges within the Turlock groundwater subbasin, and sympathizes with people
who have concerns. This is why we are continuing to fight to maintain
surface-water resources for the area, and hope to expand our water supply
beyond surface water and groundwater. We've also taken steps to conserve water
and make our canal system more efficient, most recently in the development of a
long-term TID water resources plan.

Wednesday, August 6, 2014

California Governor Jerry Brown called on lawmakers to put a $6
billion "no-frills" bond measure on the November ballot, about half
the size of a pending proposal, to secure the water supply amid a record
drought.

Brown's plan would take the place
of an $11.1 billion bond offering, scheduled for a vote in November, approved
in 2009 by lawmakers and then-Governor Arnold
Schwarzenegger. Brown said California can't afford the $750 million a
year it would add to the state's $8 billion in annual bond debt service.

Seeking to balance the state's
water needs with his reputation for fiscal caution, Gov. Jerry Brown called for
a "no-frills, no pork" $6-billion water bond in an email to campaign
supporters Tuesday afternoon..

Brown kicked off the letter by
noting that "drought conditions in California grow more serious by the
day," and acknowledging more must be done for the state's water
infrastructure.

As counties across California
begin to submit their annual agricultural crop and livestock reports, the
impact of the drought is being seen.

Fresno County, for example, is
historically No. 1 in the state and the nation for crop output but has dropped
below Tulare County this year, said Dave Kranz, spokesman for the California
Farm Bureau. Field crops had a 41.7 percent decrease followed by a 19.1 percent
decrease in industrial crops. "Drought is a direct factor in that,"
Kranz said. "We would expect to see continuing impacts with 2014."

Water is being cut off to about a
third of the farms on a federal irrigation project in the drought-parched
Klamath Basin of Oregon and California.

A July 31 letter from the U.S.
Bureau of Reclamation to irrigation districts says that the flows into the
Klamath Reclamation Project's primary reservoir have been below pre-season
forecasts from the Natural Resources Conservation Service, forcing a reduction
in releases to districts with junior claims on water in order to meet minimum
water levels for endangered fish.

The drought has forced many
homeowners and farmers to dig deeper wells, tapping into the California
aquifer. A recent Take Part web publication, citing NASA scientists, suggests
using too much of this underground water could cause earthquakes.

University of the Pacific geology
professor Kurt Burmiester said the possibility is a "maybe."

Burmiester said scientists have
found that adding water, like in oil fracking, can cause the plates to slip,
but removing water may produce smaller earthquakes outside of the faults.

Congressman Jared Huffman (D-San
Rafael) released the following statement after the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation
announced its decision today to withhold water releases on the Trinity River
needed to prevent a repeat of the 2002 Klamath fish kill:

"The U.S. Bureau of
Reclamation's decision today to withhold water releases needed to prevent a
repeat of the 2002 fish kill in the Lower Klamath River is the latest example
of how the federal government fails to plan for drought to the detriment of
tribes, fishermen, and the environment.